Welcome back to my video series on machine learning in Python with scikit-learn. In the previous video, we learned about K-fold cross-validation, a very popular technique for model evaluation, and then applied it to three different types of problems.

In this video, you'll learn how to efficiently search for the optimal tuning parameters (or "hyperparameters") for your machine learning model in order to maximize its performance. I'll start by demonstrating an exhaustive "grid search" process using scikit-learn's GridSearchCV class, and then I'll compare it with RandomizedSearchCV, which can often achieve similar results much more quickly. Here's the agenda:

Video #8: How to find the best model parameters

How can K-fold cross-validation be used to search for an optimal tuning parameter?

How can this process be made more efficient?

How do you search for multiple tuning parameters at once?

What should you do with those tuning parameters before making real predictions?

How can the computational expense of this process be reduced?

The "grid search" process covered in the video is well-known: You define a set of parameter values that you want to try with a given model, and then you use cross-validation to evaluate every possible combination of those values in order to choose between them. You could write the Python code to do this yourself, but GridSearchCV simplifies the code substantially (and provides a couple of other useful features).

However, GridSearchCV can be computationally expensive. For example, searching 10 different parameter values for each of four parameters will require 10,000 trials of cross-validation, which equates to 100,000 model fits and 100,000 sets of predictions if 10-fold cross-validation is being used. One solution is to do a "random search" instead, using RandomizedSearchCV:

In a random search process, you search only a random subset of the provided parameter values. This allows you to explicitly control the number of different parameter combinations that are attempted, which you can alter depending on the computational time you have available.

It's certainly possible that RandomizedSearchCV will not find as good a result as GridSearchCV, but you might be surprised how often it finds the best result (or something very close) in a fraction of the time that GridSearchCV would have taken. And when given the same computational budget, RandomizedSearchCV can sometimes outperform GridSearchCV when continous parameters are being searched, since a random search process leads to a more fine-grained search. (This is shown in the image above, and explained in Yoshua Bengio's paper linked below.)

Check out the resources below if you'd like to learn more, and let me know in the comments section if you have any questions! Please subscribe on YouTube to be notified of the next video. As always, thanks for joining me, and I'll see you again in a few weeks!

Thanks for the tip! My series is focused on how to get the most out of scikit-learn, hence the emphasis on grid search and random search, though I'm sure some readers will prefer to explore alternatives such as the ones you mentioned.

Sunil Tapashetti

Nice Tutorial Kevin. I was wondering if the functions provided by SciKit Learn can be used in a parallel computing environment like Apache Spark. That would make the implementation of large scale ML really fast.

Great question! Spark has its own machine learning library (MLlib) that is well-suited for that environment. As to whether you can use scikit-learn with Spark, I think the answer is yes (via pyspark), but I'm honestly not familiar enough with Spark to say for sure or to understand any limitations this might impose. Sorry I can't be of more help!

Nithin

Thanks Kevin, its a great tutorial. I have one request, would it be possible to share the code/material used in the lectures, that way we can easily search and review.

Soon! I have been working on other projects (and on vacation) this summer 🙂

Boris Ljevar

Excellent tutorial, I'm very excited to see the next one...
I also have a few questions:
Is there a difference between supervised learning and guided learning?
So far your input is alphanumeric. Is it possible to use these machine learning techniques for non-alphanumeric data, such as images and sounds?